10/19/08

Nicholas Carr on NPR

Listen to Nicholas Carr defend his position about the Internet on this thought provoking NPR podcast.

2 comments:

Joel said...

Cool podcast. I agree with Carr. I have to really sit there and focus on longer texts. I think reading on the internet has changed the way I read. If I find a blog post online that is longer than 5-6 paragraphs, I will probably pass it by. I really have a hard time reading student writing. Handwriting? Forget about it.

I think that he has a good point, and that this is a conversation that we must have with our students.

But, I don't think Google is making us stupid. The interviewer has a good point about comparing people now to people 20 years ago. Searching on the internet is more active than passively accepting what is on CNN. I think we seriously overestimate the amount of reading and "deep thinking" that Joe Lunchbucket does.

Finally, I think that this demonstrates that the printed word, the actual printed word, will hang along for awhile. The magazine and journal are not dead. The type of reading I do online is a lot different than what I do when I sit down with a well designed, professional piece of text.

Anonymous said...

Some of what Mr. Carr said is relavent but I would tend to dis agree with most of what he is saying. Google does make things easier for us to access things and, yes, at times we do skim. However, when we do reasearch in a library through we do the same exact thing. Google is a medium for information that would otherwise take hours of searching in a library to find. It isnt a list of novel and so on to sit and read for hours on end.